Iceland, Day 1

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Shelby behind the waterfall

We left Minneapolis last night around 9:30 after being dropped off at the airport by a friend of our daughters' who is helping Anneliese to house sit while we are gone.  It is a chance for her to live a little more independently for a few weeks since she lives with her parents during the school year while she attends a college nearby.  And it provides some company for Anneliese.  This year Ana will be on her own at our house for almost a week during the middle when Anneliese takes a short trip to Chicago with another friend of hers.

On the plane, I was in a middle seat between Randy and a man that currently lives in Houston, Texas, but was originally in Iceland and whose youngest child is still attending middle school in Iceland.  He was a very nice man and engaged in several conversations with us.  The children were in the two seats just behind us.

Joshua and Shelby (Joshua has swiped the airplane blanket to use as a scarf)

The "more mature" parents!

When we arrived at about 10:00 am Iceland time, we were all, of course, exhausted.  We would have loved to go immediately to our hostel and take a nap, but, due to scheduling constraints, we would have to drive about 150 miles to our hostel, stopping along the way to sightsee.  When Randy was making reservations last January, some of the hostels in Iceland were already fully booked!  With a sparsely populated island, that created a complete change of itinerary, thus the long trek to our first night's stop.

So we got our rental car and headed out.  Our last visit to Iceland had been a few days stay in Reykjavik and the landscape around the airport very desolate with dark, sandy soil and nothing growing (I called it a moonscape).   This time that same area was very different.  It had a layer of green all over--short grasses and lichens, I suppose, and lupines everywhere!  All of them purple.  In fact, we continued seeing them everywhere on our first day.  We started out with drizzle, which soon changed to sun with a cool wind.  52 degrees farenheit, very different from the temps of 92 degrees with 100 degree heat indexes in Minneapolis!

Our first stop was Sejalandsfoss (we figured out that foss means waterfall), about 3/4 of the way to Vik--our stop for the night.  Very pretty and the path makes a circle, going all the way behind the waterfall.  That was fun!

Shelby

family selfie

a nearby farm that just looked so picturesque with the snowy mountains in the background

Next we stopped at Skogafoss, another waterfall.  This was a bit larger.  The path led far up to the top of the falls, to a stile onto a field that was nice and sunny.

Joshua

(note the double rainbow!)

Another family selfie!

Next we began seeing complete fields of lupines on both sides of the road--very crazy!  We saw the Solheimajokull glacier.  We are pretty sure that jokull means glacier.  We saw a few more glaciers along the way.  (Just as a note, I will not be using all of the diacritical marks, nor the unique letters that are sometimes part of the Icelandic language partly because I'm lazy and partly because my keyboard does not include all of those marks and letters!).

Solheimajokull glacier

After that, we were still exhausted, so we found our hostel in Vik.  Joshua laid down on his bed and was instantly asleep.  Randy and I put our beds together (you have to put a flat sheet on the mattress, then put the duvet on the comforter), then went to the grocery store.  We found food for dinner and tomorrow's breakfast.  Food (and everything) in Iceland is horribly expensive, so we will be making the majority of our meals.  Each hostel has a full kitchen for this purpose.  We found a hamburger kit that was 50% off with meat patties and buns, then bought potatoes and oil (fried potatoes) and milk and fruit for dinner.  Very good.  The salt we found in the free bin was mixed with sugar (?), so that made an interesting taste for the potatoes!

our room, bathroom down the hall

Then we headed to a beach with the wreckage of an American plane that crash-landed on the beach long ago.  It was super cold and windy and several miles' walk to the site.  Shelby got too cold halfway there, so I walked her back to the car and napped until Randy and Joshua came back.  They said that it was interesting, but not worth the long, cold, walk there and back.  Back to our hostel, Joshua again went instantly to sleep.  Shelby showered while Randy and I worked on our blogs.  It is almost midnight and still light outside, this far north, and  this close to the solstice!  Time for sleep!